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impossible loyalties." Who had said that? One of the Victorians.
    "Black Ransome," Bey said, looking up. "Where did he come from, the Inner or the Outer System?"
    "We don't even know that much. He must have plenty of energy, because he never takes the kernels from the ships. But where does he get his food supplies, or his other equipment? We just don't have answers to those questions."
    The Kernel Ring was fading behind them. Leo Manx turned off the displays. Bey saw that he was holding the polished black cylinder of an enhancement recall unit and smiling in what looked like anticipation.
    "And we will find nothing about Ransome here, Mr. Wolf. We are past the region where the ship is in danger of attack. So we can now proceed to possibly more productive work. When you are ready . . ."
    * * *
    I met her at an open-air historical event, seven years and four months ago, when there was an exhibit of Old Earth animals. It was the first time they showed results of breeding back successfully beyond the Cretaceous, and the big extinct forms had attracted a lot of interest.
    I say I met her, but that is at first an overstatement. I was in an overview booth, with half an eye open for illegal forms—not much chance of that; I hadn't seen one for years—when I saw her, though she was too far away for me to speak to her. But my eye picked her out at once.
    No, it's not that I was attracted to Mary Walton at that point, not at all. I was puzzled by her. I had been in the Office of Form Control for more than half my life, and one thing that I had learned to do, whether I wanted to or not, was to monitor for anomalies. It was an unconscious act with me, and it's more than half the trick to spotting an illegal form.
    In Mary's case, I knew there was something peculiar, though it certainly wasn't something illegal.
    It was this. As you can see, I choose to hold my own appearance to about age thirty, but that's unusual on Earth. Most people like to look between twenty and twenty-five, with twenty-two the most popular age. Now, sometimes you will get older people who don't like that idea. They want to separate themselves from the real youngsters for some activities, and they spend at least part of their time in a form corresponding to age forty or fifty—even more, though people over sixty are very uncommon, unless they have other problems and drop the use of form-change treatments altogether. You saw the results of that when you picked me up in Old City.
    Mary Walton was wearing the form of a woman between forty-five and fifty and dressed in the clothing style of a woman of that age, but I could tell from other indicators—eye movement, laughter, body posture—that she was actually a lot younger than she looked. It intrigued me. Why would anyone deliberately choose a form older than her true age?
    While I was watching her, we had a minor problem with staffing, and I had to look elsewhere. But as soon as I could, I went to the place where I had last seen her, next to the big enclosure with the gorgosaurus in it. She was still there—trying to climb into the enclosure. If she had succeeded . . . The animal was carnivorous, four meters tall, two tons in weight.
    I arrived just in time to drag her clear. And to arrest her. And then to introduce myself.
    She told me she was an actress; she was doing it for publicity. I suppose I knew, right from the first moment, that she was crazy. Insane, hopelessly unaware of reality.
    It made no difference. Others will say that Mary was not conventionally attractive, that she deliberately chose to look exotic and a little peculiar. When she was living a part—she didn't act parts, she lived them—she might form-change to any age and do anything she felt fit the character. Some of them were strange, sometimes disgusting.
    As I say, to me it made no difference. From the first moment she looked down at me from the fence, when I had hold of her leg and I was pulling her back by her long gray skirt, I was